News

Apple is expected to unveil at least one new low-cost iPad model at next week’s education event, Bloomberg reports. The event, announced last week, is being held on Tuesday at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago, and is the first time Apple has held an education-related event since 2012 when it unveiled textbooks and the iBooks Author tool. According to Mark Gurman, Apple will be showing off a new version of its entry-level iPad, presumably an update to the fifth-generation iPad which debuted around this time last year starting at the previously unheard of price of $329. While there has been speculation that Apple may lower the price even further this year or introduce Apple Pencil support to the lower-end iPad, Gurman doesn’t provide any insight into that.

Apple has released a significant update to its Apple Store app, promising users “a more personal, relevant in-store experience” with recommendations for products and in-store training sessions. The highlight of the update is a new “Sessions” tab which allows users to more easily find daily sessions be held in local Apple Stores on creative subjects such as photography and music, and sessions can be filtered based on the products that a user already owns. Users can also now view stock levels for their favorite products, and scan accessories using their iPhone in-store to get more information on a product, including information such as device compatibility. New order management features also allow users to view invoices, edit shipping details and custom engraving messages, and cancel individual items in an order — all capabilities that previously required a visit to Apple’s website.

YouTube has just become the top-grossing app in the App Store, according to a new report by TechCrunch. The milestone was first spotted by the App Store marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower. While YouTube’s position has been rising on the Top Grossing charts for a few years now — ever since the launch of its paid YouTube Red subscription service — this is the first time it has risen above third place. The month after YouTube Red’s launch, the YouTube iPhone app jumped to sixth place, at which point it was estimated to be bringing in between $100,000 and $300,000 per day from the iPhone version alone. Sensor Tower notes that the U.S. is the only country where YouTube’s iPhone app has ever hit the top spot, the U.S. is one of only five countries where the YouTube Red service is available (the others being Australia, Korea, Mexico, and New Zealand).

According to a policy update from Apple, developers will soon no longer be able to change support URLs and the text in the “What’s New” section on the App Store without going through the company’s App Review process again, 9to5Mac reports. Changes to that metadata will now require developers to submit an entirely new app update where up until now the app support URL, marketing URL and update notes were able to be edited at any time. The changes go into effect starting next month.

A memo released last week by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee could put Congress on a legal collision course with Apple if Democrats take back the House of Representatives, The Intercept reports. On page 20 of the document protesting the Republican decision to end the HIC’s Russian collusion inquiry, the Democrats proposed the committee go after Apple’s “records reflecting downloaded encrypted messaging apps for certain key individuals” of interest in the investigation. Encrypted communications app WhatsApp is another target of the proposed inquiry, but the Democrats won’t have subpoena power over any of the companies in question if they can’t manage to flip the House in November.

Google has added support for finding “wheelchair accessible” transit routes to its Google Maps iOS app in order to make getting around easier for users with mobility needs. Users can filter transit directions to only include wheelchair-accessible routes by going into the “Options” section where a new “Wheelchair Accessible” route type will appear alongside the options for best route, fewest transfers, and least walking. Google says the feature is “rolling out in major metropolitan transit centers around the world” starting with London, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Boston, and Sydney, however this initial list may not be entirely comprehensive as it also appears to already be available in Toronto as well.

The French government is taking legal action against Apple and Google over “abusive commercial practices” related to app developers, Bloomberg reports. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire took issue with the strict controls Apple imposes on things like pricing, data use and the terms of contracts. “All that is unacceptable and it’s not the economy that we want,” Le Maire said. “They can’t treat our startups and developers the way they do.”

Apple has quietly added bike-sharing data to Apple Maps, TechCrunch reports. Through a partnership with Ito World, the data includes locations for bike-sharing points from several different providers in over 175 cities across 36 countries. Users will be able to search for the nearest stations in any supported city simply by typing “bike sharing” or the name of the specific service, such as “BIXI.” While Apple Maps has had limited bike-sharing data previously, this new partnership provides a much larger data set than Apple was able to put together in-house, and allows Apple to benefit from Ito World’s data as more companies are added in the future.

Amazon has expanded access to its Alexa calling and messaging options to the iPad and other tablets, Engadget reports. The feature already allowed Echo owners to communicate with iPhone users with the Alexa app installed, but today’s change opens it up to the iPad as well. The Alexa app can even call out from the iPad to any smartphone or tablet in the device’s contact list, provided it’s running the Alexa app, too — so the update isn’t limited to communicating with those with Amazon devices.

Apple has announced a deal to acquire digital magazine subscription service Texture from Next Issue Media LLC. The service charges users a flat monthly subscription fee and delivers unlimited access to more than 200 magazines, including People, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and The New Yorker. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but Apple’s services head Eddy Cue said the company is “committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users.”

A handy new app from developer Aaron Pearce aims to address an interesting problem that many advanced HomeKit users have probably run into — keeping track of all of the HomeKit pairing codes for a household full of home automation accessories. HomePass for HomeKit ($3) is a fairly simple app that efficiently addresses this issue, providing a single place to keep all of your device codes backed up so that they’re readily available should you ever need to re-pair a device, transfer it to a new home, or sell it or give it away. HomePass is capable of reading your existing HomeKit configuration to build your device list so that you can then simply tap on each device and punch in the codes, and you can also add additional accessories manually. Sadly, the app doesn’t provide any way to scan codes with your camera, so you’ll have to key them in yourself, although it does sync your database of codes to iCloud so that it’s backed up and available from multiple devices, and you can also export the data to a CSV file. [via 9to5Mac]

Apple has released an update for Apple Music for Android users, rolling in some of the improvements that will also be coming to the Apple Music app in iOS 11.3. In addition to “significantly improv[ing] stability” and reliability on more devices, the update lets users watch music videos in fullscreen or inside the Now Playing view, continue watching videos while browsing through the Apple Music app, listen to music videos in the background while using other apps, and add music videos to playlists for back-to-back playback.

Apple has rolled back the much-hyped change to its iBooks app in the fourth iOS 11.3 beta, seeming to indicate the update isn’t quite ready for a broader release. The app was renamed from iBooks to Books in the first iOS 11.3 developer beta and remained that way through the third beta release, but as of yesterday’s fourth betas of iOS and macOS it has reverted back to iBooks. Reports from January claimed the updated app will eventually include a simpler user interface, redesigned digital bookstore, a new section called “Reading Now,” and a dedicated tab for audiobooks. Some references to those features were unearthed in the early iOS 11.3 betas only to disappear in this most recent one. Several minor but noticeable problems cropped up in the beta 3 version of the Books app, including sorting issues with recently read books not appearing at the top, intermittent problems opening ePub books and PDFs that weren’t from the iBooks Store, and problems opening recent iBooks from the 3D Touch menu, so it’s possible we won’t see the final public release of the new Books app until iOS 12 this fall. The reverted iBooks app seems to be functioning normally again, but doesn’t include the new features.

Apple is one of many companies taking heat for allowing NRA TV to be broadcast on its platforms, The Huffington Post reports. A growing number of companies have severed ties with the gun lobbying group, but the NRA TV app is still available on the Apple TV App Store. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, has created a website aimed at pressuring streaming platforms to ditch the channel, which she calls a media arm of the gun lobby that “propagates dangerous misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric that pits Americans against each other and furthers their agenda of guns anywhere, for anyone, no questions asked.” Apple hasn’t publicly commented on the demand, but in the past Apple has shown some willingness to engage in the gun debate, cracking down on gun violence imagery in the App Store in 2015 and replacing its pistol emoji with a watergun in the iOS 10 update.

Apple is promoting a series of third-party apps that allow users to track skiinbg and snowboparding workouts using the Apple Watch Series 3. Slopes, snoww, Squaw Alpine, Snocru, and Ski Tracks apps have all been updated with new tracking features that take advantage of custom workout APIs in watchOS 4.2 and the device’s built-in altimeter to track vertical descent, horizontal distance, average and maximum speeds, number of runs and calories burned, among other things. Strangely not all of that data is available in Apple’s own Activity or Workout apps, but some of the third-party apps have integrations that let their recorded workouts count toward Activity Rings or the calorie measurements in the Activity app. Slopes and snoww also allow users to start tracking workouts using voice commands, making it easier to use without taking off gloves to fumble around with touch commands.

Only a day after well-known security researcher Troy Hunt launched his new new Pwned Passwords service, AgileBits has already built a proof of concept leveraging the service to help users determine if their passwords have been leaked onto the internet as part of a password breach. In a blog post, the company explains how they’ve integrated 1Password with Hunt’s new online database containing over 500 million passwords that have been collected from various breaches across the internet. While users can visit Pwned Passwords to check their passwords against the database manually, AgileBits has taken this a step further by adding a “Check Password” button in the web-based version of 1Password that can be unlocked with a specific keyboard sequence. This initial integration is strictly a proof of concept at this time, however AgileBits has stated that it plans to add this capability to the Watchtower password monitoring feature within the 1Password Mac and iOS apps to allow users to see if their passwords have been “pwned” right in the app.

Apple has released iOS 11.2.6 with an update that fixes issues with third-party apps connecting to external accessories and a bug causing the Indian Tegulu character to crash Messages and other apps. Apple had fixed the special character bug in the iOS 11.3 beta, but seems to have pushed out the fix early to keep users from having to wait for the next big release. A macOS 10.13.3 update fixes the Tegulu problem for Mac users, and Apple also released tvOS 11.2.6 for Apple TV and watchOS 4.2.3 for Apple Watch.

Apple has announced that all new apps submitted to the App Store after April 2018 will be required to support the iPhone X. In an e-mail sent to registered developers, the company heralded the new features that iOS 11 has brought to the iOS platform, adding that “Starting April 2018, all new iOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with the iOS 11 SDK, included in Xcode 9 or later. All new apps for iPhone, including universal apps, must support the Super Retina display of iPhone X.” Apple’s page on Submitting iOS apps to the App Store also adds that developers should make sure their App Store product page showcases updates for the Super Retina display of the iPhone X, and provides additional tips for developers on how to make sure that their apps look great on the iPhone X and how to submit proper screenshots for their App Store pages.

Users choosing the “Protect” option in the Facebook iOS app are being sent to download a VPN app that also allows Facebook to track their phone use, TechCrunch reports. Facebook acquired Onavo Protect and its VPN technology in 2013, but iOS users in the U.S. are just starting to see the redirect link in the main Facebook app that leads to the Onavo Protect – VPN Security app in the App Store. The app promises to safeguard private information and provide warnings about malicious websites, but it also gives Facebook the ability to monitor activity across all the apps on a user’s phone. Facebook reportedly uses those insights to spot new apps that are surging with key demographics and decide which apps to buy before they blow up or which features to steal from other successful apps, like when the company undercut Snapchat by adding similar features to Instagram. The Onavo Protect app is currently installed on more than 33 million devices, and it’s unclear how many of those users know just how much of their data is being sent back to Facebook while it’s in use.

In the followup to the popular side-scrolling snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure, Snowman is taking Alto and his friends to the desert in Alto’s Odyssey, available for pre-order now and set to be released on February 22. The new game preserves what we loved about the first, with simple, clean graphics and an uncluttered display putting the emphasis on the snowboarding mechanics and various tricks that can be accomplished.